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Pitch and Play !

Pitch and Pitch. Last week I have been part if a gemalto team organizing a hackathon, on security topic, with some great dev, tech architects, product managers and marketing folks. We spent 3 days playing the game of being a start up. And, obviously, we had to play the game of the pitch. This kind of standard exercice, where a jury expects from you, all the energy, all the positive power, to decide to bet on your project. That formal presentation mandates that you cover important stuff such as purpose of your project, ultimate value proposition, amazing business model, and potentially unveiling your heart, to convince everyone that investors can trust you, in rolling out the stuff you promised, to make them rich. Well, that is a short sumup of a pitch, but here is the spirit. And that is usually a lot of pressure.

Play and Pitch. This is where I believe the PitchCards project could help. I had a chance to handle a beta version. That PitchCards project is a game. It is about helping pitchers to pitch, with no fear. The purpose of the game, is to pitch on a pure exotic project. A project that you have to invent in 10 minutes by collecting, eyes closed, 3 cards. One for indicating which type of project you will work on (a connected device, a car, …) and two others that will express a domain, or a target (babies, dinosaur, …). Once your pitch is ready, you will have to pitch, present it in front of the other players. Purpose, business model, and all the nice story your imagination built. Your audience will listen carefully, and will have to feedback how was your pitch. this is trigerred by choosing random questions from a card deck. Where did you look at ? Did you breath correctly ? What is your motivation ? …

Pitch and Learn. I believe that this game is sooooo relevant in this special timing of a hackathon. This is a way to train your attitude, to educate your voice and your mindset to present something fun, removing the fear and the giant-attachement every startupers has with its own project. It is much more easy to receive a question related to your talk efficiency, while dealing with a fantaisist project, then speaking about the super-idea you have been working on during 3 days or 3 months, isnt’it ?

Buy the project. The PitchCards project will go live in January and you will have a chance to sponsor it, as it will land on Kickstarter. In the meantime, the team made of Will and Camille will improve, train, pitch and redesign the cards and concept. But definitely, as a beta tester I enjoyed, the concept and the spirit ! You might also, if you have any interest in pitch fun.